Strange
by chasingdragondreams
Summary: What would be the aftermath of the Bedlam saga - kidnapping children, lulling them into a false sense of love and security, then sewing buttons into their eyes, if it would have happened in twenty-first century life? You'd have a roaring American public, the media having a field-day and one terribly broken girl. AU, too long to be a one-shot


**A/N: When I was younger, I always thought it was pretty cool that I was the same age as Coraline and Wybie. My friends forgot about the movie pretty quickly - except for the occasional pop culture reference to button eyes, but what 11-year-old wouldn't?**

**Me, apparently. After seeing Coraline, I always rushed to open the door first, savouring that moment when I turned the key and heard the familiar clicking noise.**

**It just seemed so ethereal, so out-of-this world, like I would never wake up in the morning and flip through the channels, seeing a news story on a serial killer who kidnapped children, thinking they were 'saving them,' releasing them again and again, until they were done with their little mind games and blinded the children, sewing buttons in their eyes. **

**Then I realize that I would think them crazy.**

**So here we are, with Wybie an aspiring medical student in his second year of residency. I had a major plot hole in my story: what would be powerful enough to motivate Wybie, stuttering, shy Wybie, to take on a profession that involves talking to a lot of people daily?**

**Disclaimer: I own neither Coraline (the novel or the film) or the song: Strange by Tokio Hotel, which was featured on the 'Almost Alice' soundtrack of Tim Burton's 2010 spin on the classic: Alice in Wonderland.**

* * *

_a freak of nature/ s__tuck in reality,  
__I don't fit the picture/ __I'm not what you want me to be_

* * *

Carla Adam's Hospital: December 9, 2018

_Visitor information: _

_Name: Wybourne "Wybie" Lovatt_

_Purpose: Student Intern_

_Relationship to patient: unspecified_

Medical internship has always been the pits - especially when he has to listen to lectures that always seem to be held in places where they can hear the screaming of patients, see the unrestrained tears of the recently deceased's family and maybe it's just him, but in his opinion, that lingering scent never quite fades.

Whenever he walks in a hospital room (helping people is his vocation, apparently) he doesn't get hit with the overwhelming smell of blood, the harsh smell of steel instruments, of freshly laundered hospital sheets, the plastic smell of disposable gloves, or the the yellow-coloured antiseptic that comes to everyone's mind.

No, Wybie Lovatt smells the wilting daisies that to him, have come to symbolize death.

The more famous inhabitants in Ashland's Carla Adams Hospital are swamped with get-well cards, furry brown teddy-bears, brightly coloured neon balloons and filled with the sickly aroma of expensive flowers. But the poorer patients, whose relatives can't afford to buy fresh flowers every week, have vases full of daisies freshly picked from the rolling green meadows behind the woods.

Walking through the halls of Carla Adams seems like a crazy, flowery dream. A rose by another name is still a rose, but deception is a powerful tool that can turn a spider-web full of lies into a wonderful, whimsical dream (Coraline finally mustered up the courage to tell him everything that happened, four months after it occurred).

But most visitors, save the doctors, medical students and those too jaded of life to care, choose to smile at the bears, cards and balloons and ignore the place for what it truly is - an asylum full of suffering people, some of who will never leave.

* * *

_under the radar, o__ut of the system/ c__aught in the spotlight_  
_that's my existence/ y__ou want me to change  
but all I feel is strange, strange, strange/ in your perfect world_

"Hey, Jonesy," he stage-whispered, setting the bouquet of Queen Anne's Lace, indigo blooms and calla lilies gently on the standardly issued hospital chest of drawers. He knows that she can't see the flowers, the room or him right now, but he'd like to think that she can feel his presence, even though she can't really see _him_.

"Wybie?" she asked in the voice of a lost-child, and it sends an angry pang through his heart to know that that...monster could reduce a confident, laughing, full of life person to this shell and get away with it.

There had been an exuberant amount of disappearing children in Oregon, but like ever other eleven-year-old in the county, Coraline had thought she was too old, too smart to be caught by the 'Bedlam,' as the media dubbed her.

No one was too smart, and Coraline had - simply put - disappeared. Her parents, annoyed at first that she didn't come home in time for dinner, had eaten quickly, gone to their respective jobs and didn't start the search until the next morning, when they realized their only daughter wasn't coming home.

She has never forgiven them for that.

* * *

_strange, strange, strange/ in your perfect world  
don't come closer/ in your arms, forever you'll be strange, strange_

Two weeks later, when she dragged herself into a police station - dressed in a doll's costume, her body thin and pale and blood dripping from her eye sockets, the search for the Bedlam had been intensified. When the evidence was gathered - three corpses found in the basement of the suspect's house, the Bedlam's DNA left from fingerprinting on Coraline's bruised limbs and other unmentionable places- the killer had gone free only five months into the prison sentence because of good behaviour and a mysterious benefactor.

Coraline, however, was placed in an insane asylum and refused to speak to her parents, threatening to stick a finger down her throat and vomit her food up if they ever visited. She couldn't do anything during the hours that she slept, and Wybie saw her parents, Melanie and Charlie (they said to call them Mel and Char) Jones cry over the sleeping form of their daughter. They begged Wybie to ask her if they could come, to tell her that they were sorry, but he had been interrupted two sentences into their long apology letter because Coraline's eyes filled with angry tears.

She gasped, hands flying up to claw at her eyes as she screamed for water ("It _burns_!"), and that was the end of _that_.

This was back in 2009.

The Bedlam went on to kidnap, torture and molest twenty-five other children before being apprehended in Carla Adams Hospital for Insane Children, where the seventeen-year-old Coraline was staying. Wybie had gotten there almost too late, racing towards the loud screams of his best friend. It had scared him how close he came to losing her again, and this time, an eyewitness (Wybie) and the security guard ensured the Bedlam's certain death by lethal injection.

For Wybie, Coraline's parents and the families of the twenty-eight other children, it was too good for the monster. There was a lot of controversy from some political groups about how "lethal injection is morally wrong," culminating in a journalist trying to sneak in to Coraline's hospital room, wanting an exclusive interview with "The Girl Who Stopped A Bedlam."

Wybie, the student intern on hand, had blown up at the journalist, who, still in need of a better angle, had asked the ill-advised question: "So you think that the Bedlam should die for her actions? Isn't that a little harsh?"

"Look, lady. Someone goes off and blinds an eleven-year-old girl, tortures twenty-eight other kids and you think you should let them go?

"But lethal injection is a moral issue," protested the journalist, steadfast in her beliefs. "An eye for an eye; isn't that a bit uncivilized of us?"

"Do you have sons or daughters?" asked Wybie politely.

"I can't say that I have."

"Then you're _never_ going to understand the pain a kid goes through when their body is messed up for life like that. Ever."

"Is this because you have a back problem?" she prodded, and he glared, turning away to fiddle with the IV drip.

"No, this is me being a friend."

Coraline had been strangely silent during their exchange, but he knew enough about medicine to know that the sleeping pills that were administered nine hours ago must have worn off by now.

He hoped she heard everything.

* * *

_you want to fix me, push me_/_ into your fantasy  
__you try to give me, sell me/ __a __new personality_

One day Wybie comes to visit and she's staring intently at the IV and asks in a - dead, for lack of a better term - voice, if he knows how to turn the damned machines off. He panics, wondering if she knows that's going to end her life or if she's just curious about the blinking green lights.

"Aren't doctors supposed to know all these things?" she asks, feeling around for his hand. It didn't occur to him at the time, but he realizes later that she was trying to check his pulse to see if he was lying to her.

"N-no," he stutters, hoping his lie isn't as bad as it sounds to him. "I'm not that far in my studies and actually," he adds, trying to make the lie sound more plausible, "I don't think you can ever turn those thingos off."

Her raised eyebrow and subsequent "yeah right, Wybourne," makes his heart sink lower in his chest.

* * *

_you try to lift me/ __I don't get better_  
_what's making you happy/ __is making me sadder_

Ever since her seemingly random screaming fit in August, she'd been too doped up on sleeping pills to remember much. Wybie knows that the fits aren't random; she's remembering the worst days of her life.

"They caught her, you know," Wybie murmurs, sinking down besides her on the bed, holding out a lone calla lily for her to smell. They're the darkest shade of blue he could find, but sometimes he thinks that the special touch is ignored, as she takes the flower between her pale fingers and lifts it carefully to her nose.

There are five-year-old scars from the knitting needles twisting around her arms, and he knows it's going to be painful to move until she recovers from the plastic surgery needed to stitch her back together into a normal human being.

Quite frankly, he's not sure she wants to be.

Coraline's lips move, but nothing comes out.

"Sorry, didn't catch that," he jokes, handing her a cup of water. She sips, eyes (or where her eyes should be) never leaving his face, ears pricked for the sound of his voice. When she talks, it sounds scratchy, like she hasn't been using her voice for a while.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why couldn't they catch her before, Wybie?"

His eyes drop to the floor and he scratches the back of his neck, because he knows three types of burns, how to treat a patient with severe dementia and the name of every medical-related equipment in the hospital, but he couldn't answer this.

* * *

_all I feel is strange, strange/ in your perfect world_

So he ignores her question - it will come back later, most likely, and starts a story, one of a brave girl named Coraline instead of Caroline, a boy named Wybie instead of William, a story chock full of button keys and snowglobes and an Other Mother, which everyone has. He tries to remember things about her old house, like how it was a pink apartment complex and had an elderly Russian veteran who

She's transfixed and begged for more every time he came, until the final words: "and then the girl escaped."

"It doesn't say what happens after, does it?" she asked sadly, clutching the blue calla lily, which had grown brown and withered after all those years. "Not everyone makes it out alive."

But he notices little things, like how she smiles when she finds a round stone with a hole through the centre of it, and how she looks forward to the Mice King/Nutcracker part of the Nutcracker during Christmas.

She knows that the boy is supposed to be him, and the girl is supposed to be her, with a special name and a special cat. She also knows that it would've ended up more realistically if the story included police cars and was decided by a jury, not by the hand of the girl protagonist.

Her memory is fading slowly, but she still (kind of) remembers the day when they ganged up on their parents to try to change their names (so ordinary, she said) to something a little bit cooler, from William to Wizard and Caroline to Coraline. He's not sure why his parents did it, but they came home from the court laughing and handed him his new legal name: Wybourne Lovatt.

That was a happy memory, but left him with a lifetime of "Why-were-you-born" from his best friend, the newly styled "Coraline, not Caroline!"

But real life is hardly a fantasy story that can be summed up between a hundred-and-ninety-two pages, and it's far more complicated.

* * *

February 6, 2024

"Wybie?" she whispers, when she's twenty-six and he's twenty-seven, far past the age when he could wish that he could be her Prince Charming and whisk her away to a world with dancing mice, a glowing garden from which magical fruit grows off glittery trees and a pink apartment just for the two of them.

He's good at imagining things that aren't real.

"Yes, Coraline?"

"Will you do me a favour?" she asked tentatively, then decided not to wait for a stuttered response. She would miss him when she was gone. "You know how to work these thingos, don't you?"

He thought it was a trick question, since he had graduated with a Ph. D and became general practitioner two years earlier, and she was there when he took the Oath of Hippocrates. But he stayed at the Adams Hospital for Insane Children anyway, even though she's hardly a child and he's not eleven anymore, keeping an all-night vigil at her bedside.

Wybie's not sure what prompts him to say yes: it could be swimming with crocodiles, it could be balancing on a tight-rope while trying to rescue a lifeless marble-soul, but he doesn't think that _after-__Coraline_ will ask that.

"Of course I do, I'm a doctor now!"

"I want you to turn my life support off," she blurts, gripping his hand harder and staring at him with those lifeless holes. "Now."

* * *

_Forever you'll be strange, strange_

_Like me_

* * *

Epilogue:

He's not sure what prompts him to do another impulsive action ten years later, when he's in his early thirties and a successful neurosurgeon. He's not married (how could he, after _her_?) and he hasn't got any children, but somehow, on the anniversary of the Bedlam's death, when all the television specials about the child-kidnapper slash molester are playing to another horrified yet transfixed audience of children, he sits down, turns off the telly and decides to write.

Images of creepy-crawly, touchy-feely hands that Coraline must have felt from the Bedlam fill his head, along with the blue and yellow dress with stars on it that Coraline was wearing when she was found. It wouldn't do to have the story _perfectly_ mirror the tale of his oldest friend, so he changes the details up a bit.

The snow-globe from his story and the enchanted garden appear, along with the 'doll/puppet' theme the Bedlam exploited in the children, cutting smiles on some of their faces and sewing buttons into others' eyes.

Oh yes, the buttons appear many times in his story, as weapons, as a horrible fate. It's suggested that you lose your soul when you get the buttons sewed into your eyes, and he adds the three children killed by the Bedlam into his story as well.

The twenty-five other victims of fate he doesn't include, as stories don't have real endings. The hands, he's not quite positive what to do with them and keeps changing their fate, from falling down a well, being devoured by ants to drowning in a bathtub.

He'd like the Other Mother's hand to have the same fate as the Bedlam in real life, and constantly makes the Children of the Past (Ghost Children, when the publisher edits all the real facts out) refer to the spidery monster as the "Bedlam," something the publisher allowed to stay.

Of course, he knows can't give a spider lethal injection shots. That would just be silly.

But he can't help but feel a sense of closure when Wybie/William in real life pushes the hand down the well and when Pixar buys the story from him, he watches the garden scene with great happiness.

Happy endings may not exist in real life: you can escape, but evil always comes back around. Most people don't get a second chance, especially in the form of a knit doll in a lighted studio (he was quite particular about the details, insisting the stop-motion 'Coraline' have a hand-knit blue star sweater, a quirked eyebrow and a seeing stone), but as for Coraline Jones, she got doubly-lucky.

* * *

**_Coraline Ivy Jones  
_**

**_"Be clever, miss.  
Even if you win the game,  
She'll never let you leave." _**

**__****_1998-2024_**


End file.
